NSA Disguised Itself as Google to Spy, say Reports

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Photo Credit: CNET

Photo Credit: CNET

Here’s one of the latest tidbits on the NSA surveillance scandal (which seems to be generating nearly as many blog items as there are phone numbers in the spy agency’s data banks).

Earlier this week, Techdirt picked up on a passing mention in a Brazilian news story and a Slate article to point out that the US National Security Agency had apparently impersonated Google on at least one occasion to gather data on people. (Mother Jones subsequently pointed out Techdirt’s point-out.)

Brazilian site Fantastico obtained and published a document leaked by Edward Snowden, which diagrams how a “man in the middle attack” involving Google was apparently carried out.

A technique commonly used by hackers, a MITM attack involves using a fake security certificate to pose as a legitimate Web service, bypass browser security settings, and then intercept data that an unsuspecting person is sending to that service. Hackers could, for example, pose as a banking Web site and steal passwords.

The technique is particularly sly because the hackers then use the password to log in to the real banking site and then serve as a “man in the middle,” receiving requests from the banking customer, passing them on to the bank site, and then returning requested info to the customer — all the while collecting data for themselves, with neither the customer nor the bank realizing what’s happening. Such attacks can be used against e-mail providers too.

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Emails Show IRS’ Lois Lerner Specifically Targeted Tea Party

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Photo Credit: Tea Party

Photo Credit: Tea Party

Lois G. Lerner, the woman at the center of the Internal Revenue Service scandal over special scrutiny of conservative groups, specifically targeted tea party applications and directed that they be held up in 2011 in order to come up with an agency policy, according to several of Ms. Lerner’s emails released by a House committee Thursday.

In one 2011 email, Ms. Lerner specifically calls the tea party applications for tax-exempt status problematic, which seems to counter Democrats’ arguments that tea party groups weren’t targeted.

“Tea Party Matter very dangerous,” Ms. Lerner wrote in the 2011 email, saying that those applications could end up being the “vehicle to go to court” to get more clarity on a 2010 Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance rules.

In another email, from 2012, Ms. Lerner acknowledges that the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt applications had been bungled at the beginning, though she said steps had been taken to correct problems.

“It is what it is,” she wrote in the email, released Thursday by the Ways and Means Committee. “Although the original story isn’t as pretty as we’d like, once we learned [that we were] off track, we have done what we can to change the process, better educate our staff and move the cases. So, we will get dinged, but we took steps before the ‘dinging’ to make things better and we have written procedures.”

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Greens, Lobbyists and Partisans Helping Obama’s Fed Energy Commission Pick Move Through Senate

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama’s nominee to head the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is coordinating his campaign with two lobbyists for energy companies, a Democratic strategy firm and several other green-technology strategists, according to emails that show an unprecedented effort to gain a position on the obscure board.

Ron Binz, the former head of Colorado’s Public Utilities Commission, has become an unlikely nomination battleground in the Senate, where commissioners for FERC, a regulatory agency that oversees the interstate transmission of electricity, oil and gas, are usually accepted without any problems.

Mr. Binz’s opponents say the lobbying effort is evidence that environmentalists are trying to expand Mr. Obama’s global-warming agenda to FERC, a quasi-judicial independent agency that had until recently had shied away from the contentious debate.

The new emails, which The Washington Times obtained from a pressure group that requested them under federal open-records laws, indicte that FERC employees worked closely with lobbyists, strategists and an employee of the Energy Foundation, a non-profit that is supposed to be limited in what lobbying it is allowed to do.

The coordination has become an issue because it raises questions about who, exactly, is backing Mr. Binz and why lobbyists are involved.

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New Poll Shows GOP Shifting in Fascinating New Direction

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Republicans in record numbers moving toward the ideals and principles of libertarianism, according to a new poll by released by the grassroots group FreedomWorks.

The survey of all registered voters, which was conducted last month, found that a full 78 percent of Republican and GOP-leaning voters self-identify as being fiscally conservative and socially moderate

The results of the survey were first shared with POLITICO.

The poll found that its Republican and independent-leaning respondents aren’t suddenly advocating legalized marijuana and instructing people to read “The Fountainhead.” Rather, as POLITICO’s James Hohman notes, many self-identified Republicans are simply falling in line with traditional libertarian views on limited government.

This comes after years of GOP domination by “defense hawks” and “social conservatives.”

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Sen. Lee: GOP Scheme to Both Defund AND Fund Obamacare ‘Disgraceful’ (+audio)

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photo credit: gage skidmore

photo credit: gage skidmore

In an interview on the nationally syndicated Mark Levin Show yesterday, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) slammed the Republican-led initiative to simultaneously propose legislation to fund and defund Obamacare.

Lee rhetorically asked Levin, “With Republicans like these, who needs Democrats?”

Lee explained that Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is putting forward two different legislative proposals in one single vote.

One would defund Obamacare. The other would be a continuing resolution that would fund everything in government, including Obamacare.

This would allow House Republicans to vote both to fund and defund the president’s signature health law simultaneously, according to Lee.

Read more from this story HERE.

Tea Party Increasingly Unhappy with GOP Leadership

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Photo Credit: Pew Research

Photo Credit: Pew Research

As lawmakers return for what promises to be a busy fall session, GOP congressional leaders face mounting disapproval among Tea Party Republicans. Just 27% of Republicans and GOP leaners who agree with the Tea Party approve of the job Republican leaders in Congress are doing, compared with 71% who disapprove.

The job rating of GOP leaders among Tea Party Republicans has fallen 15 points since February, from 42% to 27%. Disapproval has risen from 54% to 71% over this period. There has been no similar decline among Republicans who do not agree with the Tea Party. Currently, 42% of non-Tea Party Republicans and Republican leaners approve of how GOP leaders in Congress are handling their job, which is little changed over the past year.

This internal dissent contributes to the lower job ratings Republican leaders receive from the public when compared with Democratic congressional leaders. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Sept. 4-8 among 1,506 adults, finds that just 24% of the public approves of Republican leaders’ job performance, while somewhat more (33%) approve of the job of Democratic congressional leaders.

This modest advantage for Democratic leaders stems from the substantially more positive job ratings they receive from their own base: 57% of Democrats and Democratic leaners approve of how Democratic congressional leaders are handling their job. That compares with just 36% of Republicans and Republican leaners who approve of the job their party leaders are doing. Democratic and Republican leaders get similarly low job ratings from members of the opposition party.

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Iraq War Vet, now Democratic Congresswoman Strongly Opposes Military Strikes Against Syria

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Picture Tulsi GabbardDemocratic congresswoman and Iraq War veteran Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii stated her opposition earlier this week to punitive military strikes against Syria, underscoring the Obama Administration’s struggle in trying to rally even members of his own party to back the use of force.

After participating in public and private sessions on Capitol Hill, Gabbard stated a U.S. military strike would be a serious mistake.

“As a soldier, I understand that before taking any military action, our nation must have a clear tactical objective, a realistic strategy, the necessary resources to execute that strategy, including the support of the American people, and an exit plan,” Gabbard said in a statement. “The proposed military action against Syria fails to meet any of these criteria.”

Gabbard, who served near Baghdad for a year and was a medical operations specialist, is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The congresswoman joins other Democrats from Obama’s native state, including Sen. Brian Schatz and Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, in opposing aggressive U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war.

Rep. Gabbard explains her opposition to Greta Van Susteran “On the Record.”

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Shares Raw Data on Americans with Israeli Spy Agency

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration shares with Israeli intelligence the vast data dumps the National Security Agency vacuums up from the Internet without removing private information about Americans, even though Israel is one of the nations that spy most aggressively on the United States, according to leaked documents.

A copy of a top-secret deal inked in 2009 between the NSA and the Israeli Signals-intelligence National Unit (ISNU) was provided by NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden to the Guardian newspaper, which posted it Wednesday.

It reveals that the NSA “routinely” passed to its Israeli counterpart “raw” signals intelligence, referred to as “Sigint,” including the vast swathes of digital data traffic that the agency gathers under secret court authority from U.S. Internet providers.

So sensitive is this data that even before being disseminated to other U.S. agencies, the NSA has to subject it to a court-mandated process called minimization, under which the names of any Americans are removed unless they are essential for foreign intelligence interest.

But the U.S.-Israeli agreement states that the data shared with Israel “includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

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Study: Obamacare has Been Amended or Delayed 19 Times

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Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

Photo Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta

President Obama has already signed 14 laws that amend, rescind or otherwise change parts of his health care law, and he’s taken five independent steps to delay the Affordable Care Act on his own, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, released Wednesday.

The release comes as congressional Republicans are pushing for a halt or outright repeal of the whole law, and as Mr. Obama and his allies decry that as a waste of time and an effort to undermine his signature political achievement.

CRS, in the report to Sen. Tom Coburn, said all sides have already agreed to 14 laws that changed parts of Obamacare, though they were usually minor changes or clarifications.

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Former DHS Officials Say Oversight Needs to Be Centralized at Senate Hearing

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Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Photo Credit: Free Beacon

Former officials with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday urged members of Congress to centralize oversight and codify the responsibilities of a department whose budget has more than doubled since its creation roughly a decade ago.

DHS was formally established in 2002 to combine 22 different federal agencies and departments and integrate intelligence, law enforcement, disaster response, and transportation security in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

While the United States has managed to prevent terrorist threats on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks 12 years ago, critics of DHS say vital intelligence still appears to slip through the cracks of the sprawling 240,000-employee department and its appendages. The DHS budget has swelled from nearly $20 billion in 2002 to $46 billion this year.

The Boston Marathon bombings renewed concerns about information sharing between federal agencies and local law enforcement entities. Congressional testimony in May revealed that the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force received scant direction from the FBI about keeping tabs on Tamerlan Tsarnaev—the older of the two brothers who perpetrated the bombings—after the federal agency determined he did not pose a threat in 2011. The Massachusetts State Police and the local “fusion center” for intelligence sharing were also not aware of the brothers or Tamerlan’s 2012 trip to the radicalized Dagestan region of Russia.

Tom Ridge, the first DHS secretary, told members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs that the department needs better oversight to improve its information sharing. He added that communication across branches of a department still poses problems for entities like NASA, which was formed by combining agencies in a similar manner more than 50 years ago.

Read more from this story HERE.